Sorry, McCain Is Not Smart

This is hilarious. Right wing blogger Steve Sailer (whose blog is about as anti-Obama as this one is anti-McCain) writes that John McCain is actually a genius. And no, I don't mean a foreign policy genius, or a political genius. I mean a grade-A, Mensa International genius:

The military shrinks gave McCain good marks for mental stability. The main bad-sounding thing that anybody published (other than one embarrassing medical condition) is that he has a "histrionic pattern of personality adjustment" (i.e., he's a big drama queen), but probably anybody who wants to campaign for President is kind of like that.

They tested his IQ twice. I can only find the second (and presumably higher) result. Time wrote in 1999:

Included in the records is a 1984 IQ test. His score, 133, would rank him among the most intelligent Presidents in history.

How exactly Time would know that 133 "would rank him among the most intelligent Presidents in history" is not explained. The only known tested IQ is JFK's (which was in the 115-120 range at prep school). I'd long heard that Nixon scored 143; when I tried to verify it a couple of years ago, I found lots of webpages saying that Nixon's IQ was 143, but all their supporting links pointed to a 1999 article by ... me. And I've forgotten where I got that figure.

Does anyone really think that John McCain is Mensa material? Give me a fucking break. The guy graduated 894th out of 899 in his Naval Academy. Where would he have placed if his father and grandfather weren't Admirals? Would he have graduated at all?

Go read McCain's 1974 War College essay regarding POWs. It's filled with misspellings galore. Listen to McCain's public pronouncements on policy issues. The guy doesn't know what the hell he is talking about.

-He doesn't know that his cap-and-trade program includes mandatory caps.
-He doesn't know anything about economic policy.
-He doesn't know that Iran is Shiite and Al Qaeda is Sunni.
-He doesn't know that troops levels are still far above pre-surge.
-He doesn't know that his plan to privatize Social Security is called "privatization".

The guy is a human gaffe machine. He's never demonstrated nuanced, in-depth knowledge about anything. His academic career is embarrassing, his Naval career went nowhere despite his lofty lineage and the gravitas of being a POW, and his political legacy is confused and contradictory, to say the least. I'm sorry, I don't care what kind of phony-baloney "IQ test" was given to him in 1984, McCain is NOT a fucking genius.

Laughably, this Steve Sailer guy tells us that JFK only scored in the 115-120 range, while Richard Nixon had a towering intellect in the 140s. His only proof: he pulled it out of his ass. Yes, I'm sure the president who told us "Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country" was dumber than the megalomaniac, paranoid buffoon Nixon. Earlier in his post, Sailer also tries to claim that George W. Bush is smarter than John Kerry, another laugh-out-loud proposition.

I know I'm biased, but it's pretty apparent that the smartest guys running for President the last 50 years have been Democrats. Of the Republicans, Dwight Eisenhower was very smart, and George H.W. Bush made some good decisions on occasion. But McCain, W., Nixon, and Ford just don't compare to Clinton, Carter, JFK, Gore, Kerry, and Obama. Not even close.

Please, Republicans, don't pretend that John McCain is a genius. Don't even go there. Talk about his gut, talk about his many centuries of experience, talk about his military background. But do us a favor and stop pretending that Stumblemouth McCain is Einstein.